News

Laborjack Scales Gig Economy Platform for Moving, Landscaping, and Staffing

Published

4 years ago

11/16/2020

Kokou Adzo

We talked to Blake Craig and Josh Moser of Laborjack about hiring reliable workers during the pandemic times.

Table of Contents

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Josh Moser: Well, thanks for asking! Both of our families are doing well, although it has impacted people we are close with. Fortunately, our team has not experienced any extreme sickness related to the virus. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a difficult time all around. However, from a business perspective, we are blessed that our model has been resilient to the virus, and we have remained operational as an essential business.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Laborjack.

Blake Craig: We believe showing is better than telling, so please view this quick founders’ story video for a creative look into how Laborjack started.

Laborjack was formed around this premise: access to quality labor should be trustworthy, safe, convenient, and affordable. Laborjack provides individuals and businesses with access to reliable labor on their schedule in just a few clicks online. Our focus is on the moving, landscaping, and staffing industries. We leverage a gig economy model that connects hard-working talent with clients who need help with a wide variety of projects. Our workers, who we call “Laborjacks,” are vetted, reviewed, insured, and hard working.

How does Laborjack innovate?

Josh Moser: innovate through our software and our processes. For this reason, we had a lot of early success and were able to build the business with a lot of hustle and little capital. We are completely bootstrapped and have reinvested all of our cashflows to grow Laborjack into what it is today: the easiest source for labor online. As we’ve evolved, we have built everything to be much more complex, and we know we will never be done innovating. We have laid the foundation, which makes Laborjack an extremely scalable business model. There’s a lot of work left to do, but our software will compete head to head with bigger players on a nation-wide scale.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Blake Craig: At first, we thought the virus would be extremely detrimental to our business. Our revenues did drop, but we were able to rebound at levels that even surprised us due to our model’s resiliency. Let’s face it, Laborjack is a platform that allows people to schedule workers they’ve never met to come into their home and help them with a task. What we found, however, was that our product is so necessary that after a slight dip in March and April, people needed to get stuff done more than ever! We had record-breaking numbers all summer and continue to do so as we head into the fall and winter months.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Josh Moser: We make difficult decisions on a daily basis. The biggest decisions we face revolve around the scalability of our platform and how we plan to expand. With an upcoming capital raise on the horizon, we are entering a new chapter. We are more excited than ever to grow Laborjack into the household name we know it is capable of being. There is nothing that restricts our model or software geographically. How we plan to expand is up to us, however! The Covid-19 pandemic taught us many lessons, and we had to make many difficult decisions about the safety of our staff that continue to affect us today.

Blake Craig: How do you deal with stress and anxiety? How do you project yourself and Laborjack in the future?

Blake Craig: Stress and anxiety are, unfortunately, a part of being an entrepreneur. How you channel this anxiety and stress, however, is what is most important. Whether it is playing soccer, going on a hike, or relaxing with friends and family, it is extremely important to keep a work-life balance. More money and less stress is the goal we often joke about! The only way this is possible is through innovation and to create amazing teams and ecosystems that are scalable and replicable. In the future, Laborjack will be the nation’s go-to source for reliable manual labor. That is our mission, and we will not stop (or sleep) until it happens.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Josh Moser: We face competition from traditional moving companies, staffing agencies, and landscaping companies. We also face competition from other innovators, like Task Rabbit and Bellhops. We are a unique competitor in the marketplace and believe that focusing on our own mission and objectives is what has led to our success thus far. If anything, competition from other innovators in the labor space proves just how big a market we are building our business in.

Your final thoughts?

Blake Craig: Laborjack is here to stay! We are a small business with big motives. We currently operate in Colorado and Arizona, and more information can always be found on our website.